A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

THE NATURE OF SPIRITUAL INTERLOCUTORS
The dependence upon spiritual agency exhibited by Spiritualism’s utopian politics gives rise to
the question of how these spirits were understood by the movement’s participants. Over time,
the spectral interlocutors that inhabit each successive moment discussed within this dissertation
become increasingly estranged. Spiritualism’s status as an early moment of neo-enchantment
correlates to the relative familiarity of the Others who constituted its primary agents. This was
primarily a result of the level of confidence inherent in nineteenth century modernity. While
those creatures who existed between man and perfection or man and God had in earlier instances
(e.g. the angels of Medieval Europe) been terrifying to behold and would again assume a terrible
form in the case of alien abduction, the sense, so prevalent in the nineteenth century, that
humanity was on the brink of perfection, cast the spectral interlocutors of the displaced utopian
imaginary in a form wholly comprehensible, even homely. My argument is not that the
understood intermediaries between humanity and perfection had in some un-named past been
fully comprehensible and then entered a downward spiral into inscrutability, culminating in alien
abduction. Rather, my tale of the displaced utopian imaginary begins at a high point of
disenchantment and then tracks the re-estrangement of that middle figure. Beginning with
Swedenborg’s observations of the very familiar contours of heaven—spirits wore clothes, lived
in houses, and pursued careers— spiritualists tended to view spirits as being very human. While
spirits are uncanny, they maintained enough of their previous humanity that they were more like
humans than different. As to their material needs, one spirit responded to a querent’s difficulty
over whether spirits were clothed or not as follows.
Beloved One: There are spheres or locations in Spirit realms, those nearest Earth, whose
inhabitants would experience the emotion called Shame were they unclothed; these
people wear garments of more or less density. The lower the person is in spirituelle [sic]
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